Wednesday, 28 October 2015

On Monday and Thursday evenings, I teach undergraduate language
support groups. I don’t look forward to the Monday class. In a remote and cavernous
classroom at the end of an unlit corridor of the nearly empty Dennis Wheatley building, I have a group of eight
Chinese kids who have obviously taken a vow of silence - never a good thing in a language learner. On a dark Monday evening at
half-past six, half way through our two-hour class, a chill and lonesome
mood will often steal over me: fuck, what am I doing here?

I arrive at the empty classroom at five in the evening to
make sure the computer and the sound are working.The room could accommodate ice hockey, so I drag four tables to the front to make two islands close to the
screen and whiteboard. The first student to arrive is Viola, a small girl who shuns all expression, facial and verbal. She does not return my greeting but sits down and begins solemnly jabbing at her
smartphone. Over the next fifteen minutes more students drift in, silent as ghosts, park
themselves and begin to prod their phones. I go out to the loo, then treck to the
water cooler to fill my bottle of water and return at five thirty to find all eight
students present, silent, intently flicking and poking their private mini-screens.
Even though they are sitting in groups of four around the two tables I’ve
placed close together, each seems completely alone. I’m supposed to teach
them seminar skills.

‘Right you buggers, for Christ’s sake put them fucking phones
away and let’s get cracking!’ I shout. (Use the higher end of your vocal range
for this, you sound friendlier that way.) We are going to do a dictation, but
first I elicit phrases you can use to get someone to speak more slowly or more loudly,
or spell a word for you. Or at least I try. Nobody speaks. I ask again for ways
in which these functions might be realised and eventually Viola makes a suggestion. Even though I didn't hear what she said, I receive it as enthusiastically as a parent greets baby's first poo in a potty. Nobody else heard either but she will not be prevailed upon to repeat it. It's as if she expects to be billed for any word she utters. Never mind. Here are some phrases I prepared before the show, floating in on the screen:

Could you slow down a bit, please?

Could you speak up a bit, please?

Could you spell that for me, please?

We practise the stress and intonation and probably they are
all thinking: ‘why did he spend ages trying to drag these out of us when he had
them on a PowerPoint all along? Why the cat and mouse?’

So, the dictation. I make it clear that they can use the
phrases on the screen should I make it necessary, and then read the whole paragraph
at a rattling pace, finishing it in about ten seconds. Silence. It’s the same
hermetic, solipsistic silence that accompanies the smartphone jabbing. I begin to think I may be invisible. The
room gets bigger and colder. Weeks pass. Then Cassie says in a tiny, timid whisper: ‘could
you slow down a bit, please?’

Now once they get the idea, it begins to work. Each
member of four pairs is given a short text to dictate to the other and they
actually start to laugh a bit as they use the formulas. We are still a long way from seminar skills,
the ten minute warmer has now lasted nearly half an hour and the speaking they
are doing is one hundred percent scripted, but they are at least speaking. I suppose
it’s a start.

At six thirty-ish I allow a five minute
phone-poking break while I go to refill my bottle of water, and return to find
the eight of them in silent, rapt communion with their screens. If there were
such a thing as an e-monastery, a meditation period would be like this. The cold, lonely, far-from-home feeling visits me again: all this preparation for so little response or enthusiasm... I have this pathetic need to feel useful and appreciated and they're not making me feel either... Right, sod this. Only an hour to go and we can
all get the hell out. Get a sense of proportion, you wuss.

We watch a seminar discussion on You Tube. It’s staged by
teachers and is rather too full of phrases for agreeing and disagreeing and
holding the floor and what-not to sound entirely natural, but the kids manage to pick these out. I
then give them a partial transcript of the discussion which they act out in
their groups. They have not produced a single spontaneous utterance all evening,
but they have practised a lot of useful language and done lots of pronunciation
work, and next week they’ll participate in a discussion if I have to resort to
water-boarding.

Seven twenty-four: sod it, let’s go. They troop out. Two even
say ‘good night’. I must point out that they are nice kids. If I see them on
campus they always smile and wave. It’s just that classrooms turn them into
wraiths. I wait for three minutes or so, time enough for them to go along the
dark corridor, round the corner and out of the building, before letting the
fart I’ve been bottling since six forty-five. Instantly, the door opens and
Cassie is back. I dive across the room towards her so that she might not enter
the zone of befouled air, but to her I must look almost
suspiciously pleased to see her. She will not be able to come next week, she
tells me. Fine, fine, no problem, thanks for telling me, I gabble, almost
forcing her out of the room.

Usually I leave work in a hurry, anxious to get the earliest
train possible. These Monday evenings I have nearly fifty minutes on my hands
before I get the eight eighteen. I go to Sainsbury’s, there to purchase gin, a small
reward to myself for not visiting GBH on anybody this evening. By half past
nine I’m home. I shower, slip into something shapeless, light the candles and
pour a devastating G&T. The sweetest part of any day is when you’ve shut
the door on the world for the coming twelve hours.

*****

My Thursday group - all Chinese again - did the same lesson this evening and it went down a treat. Lots of participation, lots of spontaneity, lots of discussion. Even the most reticent of the students were drawn in and said their bit, and we all left together carrying on the conversation down three flights of stairs to the exit. I wish I knew exactly what made the difference.

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Quite.

''When the Washington Post telephoned me on Valentine's Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa, I felt at once that this was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humour, the individual and the defence of free expression''

"Nothing optional - from homosexuality to adultery - is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishments) have a repressed desire to participate."

''The four most overrated things in life are champagne, lobster, anal sex and picnics.'

Christopher Hitchens

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Richard P. Feynman

''Are introverts arrogant? Hardly. I suppose this common misconception has to do with our being more intelligent, more reflective, more independent, more level-headed, more refined, and more sensitive than extroverts. Also, it is probably due to our lack of small talk, a lack that extroverts often mistake for disdain. We tend to think before talking, whereas extroverts tend to think by talking, which is why their meetings never last less than six hours. "Introverts," writes a perceptive fellow named Thomas P. Crouser, "are driven to distraction by the semi-internal dialogue extroverts tend to conduct. Introverts don't outwardly complain, instead roll their eyes and silently curse the darkness." Just so.''

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Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

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Barbara Trapido'Frankie and Stankie'.

On God

Sick of it, whatever it's called, sick of the names.I dedicate every pore to what's here.

Ikkyu1394-1481

on trying not to be an arse

On Buddhist meditation:

'Although it is embarrassing and painful, it is very healing to stop hiding from yourself. It is healing to know all the ways that you shut down, deny, close off, criticize people, all your weird little ways. You can know all that with some sense of humor and kindness. By knowing yourself, you’re coming to know humanness altogether.'